Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 25, 2013 @11:10AM
from the together-again-at-last dept.

mikejuk writes "The founders of the original MySQL, the open-source database, are getting back together in a merger between Monty Program and SkySQL. SkySQL was created by around two dozen former MySQL executives and investors after Oracle bought MySQL from Sun. Widenius started Monty Program AB and created the MariaDB database from some of MySQL's open source code. The merger will provide a stronger rival to MySQL, so reassuring users who are worried about Oracle's future plans for the database."

Yes,... it'll outclass MySQL in no time... or rather, negative time, since it has been clearly superior to MySQL for years in every way. The only thing that keeps MySQL popular is people who don't know what they are doing, which it does fine for.

A number of developers familiar with MySQL fire up PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server or Oracle, try it out for awhile, find that they get a ton of errors that they don't understand because MySQL let them get away with egregious idiocy, and then retreat back to MySQL.

If I understand the release correctly, this will mean that MariaDB will continue with organizational support from SkySQL. Sounds like they are well on the road to being the top MySQL "distribution" which is good reassurance for making the switch.

Who were they planning on selling it to next, and why should that make me feel all warm and fuzzy about using My/Sky/MariaDB?

what does it matter? anyhow, they're probably getting revenue stream from selling support for it.IF they find someone stupid enough to dump millions on them for the _name_ then why not? good luck for finding a sucker like oracle again.

that would enable them to do r&d and development on it for a while without worrying about ongoing support contracts.

The real shocker is that Monty tried to get the Sun-Oracle merger court to remove the GPL from MySQL, and allow companies to take the code private, so he could basically pick up where MySQL AB left off before he sold it to Sun in the first place.

What you call beauty, the rest of the world refers to as a worthless side project, and hence why Oracle dropped work on it.

You guys think this is a good thing, you're too stupid to realize this is just another example of why a business wants nothing to do with GPL'd software. They can dump a metric fuckton of money into it and then watch the prick who made it walk out the door and take it to someone else and do the same thing.

Because Sun never (that we now of) requested a legal binding of no competition for their purchase of MySQL AB. Sun wasn't bad, ethically, maybe one of the reasons they went under. Oracle on the other hand just got what they got from Sun

Oracle could give a fuck if MySQL exists, you're sadly uninformed if you think MySQL competes with Oracle in anyway. They are not just in different classes, they're at almost complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

Oracle bought Sun for Java and high end servers. This is clear based on their strategy of you know... using those things they bought and not discarding them like the crap that Sun had that they see no future in, such as Whatever

Probably wasn't "the" reason, but was one of the strong ones. Java and Solaris should be the other components, with Solaris maybe being the most strategical ones.

And yes, MySQL competes against Oracle in what matter most to the company: support contracts. There is a bunch of databases with better features than MySQL, but it have by the market (or at least, as most aren't sales, the users, or the amount of installations).

"Now that Widenius has some "Executives and Investors" supporting him, he becomes a target for Oracle lawyers."

I don't see why. Open Source projects (and MariaDB is pretty solidly Free & Open Source... I doubt they'd have even the slightest trouble proving that) have long enjoyed corporate support. I don't see that it changes anything.

For a billion dollars even a true believer would sell. You could take a fraction of that billion and make another DB and still have enough money to jerk off with thousand dollar bills for the rest of your life.

"general absence of programmers, engineers fails to deter C-levels from merging two companies in an effort to become a more robust alternative to databases that still arent hadoop, couch or hypertable"

You're both right based on different perspectives. The original poster was sympathizing with all of the members of the MySQL community who contributed to the product but received none of the money from the sale. While they were not legally entitled to any of that money, most people considered it very bad form. However, you are correct that the users of MySQL still benefit regardless of who owns the company, but that doesn't do anything to make the actions of the sellers more acceptable.

I was just coming around to the idea I might explore MariaDB next time I needed to do something, where normally I've been turning to MySQL. Is SkySQL replacing that, now?

Also, do any of the large, inexpensive web hosts (hostgator, dreamhost, servint, etc.) provide either of these alternatives yet? Because frankly I'm not going to do a lot of personal configuration or pay a lot extra just for the novelty.

They are replacing MySQL with MariahDB for their hosted solutions and throwing financial backing at the project. MariahDB is not going away. I would encourage you to look into PostgreSQL however as an alternative: http://www.postgresql.org/ [postgresql.org]

I've heard good things about Posgres from people who should know what they're talking about, but I haven't had anything important or demanding enough to go out of my way to explore it yet. Next time I've got something with any actual business use, I'll probably take a closer look at it. Database stuff isn't part of the day job, so it doesn't come up a lot.

1. Create a popular but flawed FLOSS product (MySQL).2. Build a business atop flawed FLOSS product (MySQL AB).3. Ca$h out by selling your baby to formerly glorious tech company on the ropes (FGTCOTR, aka SUN).4. Profit!5. Leave FGTCOTR after a tasteful waiting period to start your own company DOING THE SAME THING YOU JUST SOLD because you can fork the OSS codebase you just sold.6. Take public potshots at EVIL Corp (who very predictably acquired FGTCOTR) for mismanaging the baby you sold (because EVIL), while flogging your fork of the product you sold as a viable alternative (FLOSS, to cloak yourself in the veneer of legitimacy because you can live off of steps 3 and 4).7. Reunite to form company that does the same thing the company you sold for big $$$ did, to compete with the product you willingly relinquished control over.8. GOTO #1?

I can't decide whether to admire Monty for successfully gaming the system, or condemn him as an amoral manipulator who wasted no time screwing over the very people he sold out to at the earliest possible opportunity.

Grudgingly, I lean toward admiration. Nicely done, sir.

That said, I avoid MySQL as the half-baked relational DB pretender that it is and use PostgreSQL whenever possible. Better technology without the drama. I have never regretted PgSQL once, MySQL many times.

Sun was retarded to buy MySQL in the first place. It was just a fucking stupid thing to do, especially for a billion fucking dollars. They could have had it for free... instead they gave this douche a billion and HE gets it for free.

Oracle then proceeded to buy Sun for Java and server hardware. MySQL was never something they cared about. They'll probably be happy if he'd just take it and shut the fuck up. MySQL doesnt' compete in any way

I'll agree with you except for the part where they'd be happy if he just took it and STFU. I think Oracle knew exactly what they were doing when they bought Sun, and they cared quite a lot about MySQL. I think Oracle was happy to try and exploit MySQL's popularity as a "gateway drug" - they would be poised and waiting with salespeople to offer a "real database" when folks who built a business on LAMP outgrew it and were looking for something better. To support this opinion, I'll remind you that Oracle bo

You're splitting hairs. Companies are run by people. They have or lack the morals the people who run them have.

Also, Monty announced leaving Sun in Feb 2009 to create his own company. The Oracle merger was completed in Jan 2010. So he conceived of and created his own company to compete with the one he sold to well before Oracle owned MySQL.

Ok honestly, what has Oracle done with MySQL that has been so bad? They've been pretty good stewards. MySQL 5.6 came out and even included full text search for InnoDB. I'm pleased with the product and it's progress.

This smells like the Jenkins/Hudson gayness... All these projects are forking because of big bad Oracle, before Oracle has even done anything. Good god, the open source community is LUCKY to have a corporation that is willing to sink dollars into an open source project. If that means giving up

I think the FOSS community would probably have been fine if MySQL had remained with an independent (and profitable) Sun. But Oracle is not Sun. For me, personally, the Oracle v. Google lawsuit pretty much gave notice that Oracle would go scorched earth on anyone who used "their" open source properties in ways they didn't approve of.

You have no idea what the term scorched earth means. It in no way applies to what they've done. Stop using words you don't understand just because you heard someone else say it and it sound scary evil to you.

Maybe this [mariadb.org] could give you a hint. Looks like a small factor, but is critical for validating whatever you want to do with the code. If is the start of a trend, better to be in a safe zone, i.e. elsewhere.

This soap opera is getting way too confusing. Way too much money, way too many project names. In the end, whatever they come up with to circumvent Oracle, they will just sell to the next highest bidder for another billion, then rinse and repeat.

It seems the only way for us to circumvent all this BS is not to use anything affiliated with Oracle, MySQL, or its creators.

Thats what they did isn't it? They sold out, then took their toys and left, and are going to do it again.

Congratulations, you have illustrated to every business in the world who's paying attention why it would be absolutely fucking stupid to invest any money in a GPL project. Your greed has effectively manipulated the concept of FOSS into something more evil than even what Oracle does.

Oracle is up front about stabbing you in the back. They'll tell you they are going to do it. This prick is just a two fa

they didn't show that it would be stupid to invest money in a gpl product.

they just showed that it's a stupid idea to buy a gpl product. investing into it before that was very, very smart from financial point, because someone was stupid enough to buy it for an ungodly amount of money, and for support contract etc. reasons it was probably smart to invest in it even if there hadn't been a sellout - and I don't think he ever made a statement saying otherwise, that he wouldn't ever compete with it after selling

The majority of the internet would disagree with you. I'm not a big DB person but I do use MySQL on my hosted website. I'd happily go to Postgresql if my provider offered it though.

So many people (99%-ish?) use MySQL as a multi-user sqlite, to organize a few thousand rows for personal sites. And that's great, Mysql is well understood and lived long enough as a fully open source project to be a good choice. But people who use databases for *serious* work (not to devalue anyone's blog, but serious here means many tables of 1M+ rows) there is a vacuum in the open source space since the innovation that used to happen at MySQL is now kept private.

Understood, but as far as I am aware, MySQL never pretended to be that. I've been aware of MySQL for over a decade and used it off and on. I'm not a DB admin so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But MySQL was always the "Use it for your website!" DB package. Facebook seems to get a lot of use from it, granted they use a patched version.

Postgresql was supposed to be the heavy lifter if I remember right. Is this not the case?

Depend on how you define "best". But if market followed the technical best we all would be using. don't know, maybe OS/2 and programming in Ada. As we aren't in that idillic world, we have to deal with what is in use this one. Sometimes you have to live with "good enough for most simple uses", even if are used in environments/ways that are beyond its capacity.

Understood, but as far as I am aware, MySQL never pretended to be that.

Monty has long made excuses for MySQL's inadequacies (most notably the pre-INNODB argument that foreign key constraints weren't really that important and you could just enforce such constraints in software). So there *were* attempts to pretend that MySQL was a "serious" database equivalent to better alternatives. Many of the shortcuts MySQL uses (or used - some of this is historical) apply to edge cases that aren't apparent to "I'm not a DBA" developers creating simple LAMP applications. But when you *do* run into one of those edge cases, then you quickly feel the pain and realize that it could have all been avoided.

Regardless of what database they used, to achieve the scale and performance they require would require similar clustering, memchaching, partitioning, sharding, load balancing, etc. There simply isn't an out-of-the-box database that can scale to this level without resorting to the kind of complexity that facebook has implemented.

I don't think that's quite true - Hadoop works just fine for the analysis backend at Facebook, which stays just as busy. The problem lies with legacy systems written for a RDBMS that could just as easily have been written for a NoSQL DB. If you were starting from scratch today, NoSQL makes a whole lot of sense and scales out-of-the-box quite well - but that's useless to the existing code base.

All of the major cloud providers have their own version of scale-by-sharding systems for RDBMS, but they're mostly

There are multiple that will do that very thing and in fact have been.

Facebook is a popular website. Thats where it ends.

There are multiple out of the box solutions that will in fact work as well as MySQL did 'out of the box' Since they are in no way using Out of the Box MySQL your entire statement is retarded and pointless. You're trying to compare a custom version of some software to an off the shelf generic version and pretend its a fair comparison.

The majority of Internet users use web applications as a user, not as a server administrator, and definitely not as a developer.

I'd happily go to Postgresql if my provider offered it though.

Have you considered SQLite? Some MySQL haters would claim that some of SQLite's features are better even if the concurrency is worse, and if your site is on a plan smaller than a VPS, it probably isn't popular enough to need heavy concurrency yet.

MySQL (or MariaDB, or SkySQL) are not suitable for use in banking, but the vast majority of database applications don't have the same requirements of banks. Banks have extremely high data integrity, retention and security requirements. Armoured cars have extremely high security and cargo integrity and retention requirements. But vast majority of transportation applications don't require armoured cars.

MySQL is demonstrably scaleable and is secure and robust enough for the vast majority of applications. It is used extensively in health care - which has fairly high privacy and data retention requirements. It's a matter of using the right tool for the right application. Sledge hammers are useful for breaking concrete, not so much for framing. Statements like "because banks don't use MySQL, you shouldn't either" are just ignorant.

I've heard this a lot - this idea that PostgreSQL has better transactional integrity than MySQL, but most applications don't need it, and so they are fine using MySQL instead.

That's a good reason to not rule out MySQL, but it's not a reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. What exactly are the reasons for choosingMySQL/MariaDB/SkySQL over PostgreSQL? I don't know enough about databases to answer this myself, but every time I read about this question, all I hear is "most people don't need PostgreSQL so there

To be fair, I think if Facebook were starting over today with a clean codebase, and know they were going to grow into such a massive enterprise, they might have made different design choices. As it is, they are committed to MySQL and have tuned, optimized and tweaked the hell out of it to suite their requirements.

To be fair, I think if Facebook were starting over today with a clean codebase, and know they were going to grow into such a massive enterprise, they might have made different design choices. As it is, they are committed to MySQL and have tuned, optimized and tweaked the hell out of it to suite their requirements.

I believe a Facebook engineer once stated exactly what you suggest. I'm sure they would have gone another direction but just the fact that Facebook is able to use it like it does seems to imply it's a pretty capable open source project, despite its flaws.

In reality, MySQL is sort of a poster child for open source software. It's a case where a company started using it to keep expenses down. Out grew it but because they had the source they were able to modify it for their use and contributed it back to the co

There are several good open source/free to use database engines. MySQL is not one of them.

That depends on what kind of user base you want. If you develop a web application for installation on hobbyist web sites, something comparable to WordPress or phpBB or MediaWiki, you need to make it compatible with MySQL because so many budget web hosts provide only MySQL (and possibly SQLite).

Then you've not shopped around as there are plenty of budget providers that offer PostgreSQL. I buy and sell vintage & antique furniture from estate sales on the side. Last year I took a break from IT projects, but I did write a simple mobile web app to display my stuff online using jQuery Mobile, Perl, and PostgreSQL using A2Hosting as my provider for like $6 a month.

This year I'm working on IT projects again. This one just so happens to be based around Wordpress for many reasons. In Q3 this year I

Whilst I agree with you (having sweated blood over fixing corrupted MySQL tables more times than I'd care to mention), and wish there was more support for more robust databases, it seems most of the world hasn't caught up with this idea yet.

Not only do most webhosts only support/provide MySQL (IIRC due to Postgres and others not having quota support), but there's a vast swathe of projects out there that don't have support for anything other than MySQL. Heck, I was looking into upgrading my home install of G

You're confused. The problem is not MySQL, rather, it's tying an application to ANY specific database. No two databases implement all of the features of a modern relational database in the same way. Transactions, concurrency, prepared statements, stored procedures, referential integrity, mem caching, connection pooling, etc, are all implemented differently and in some cases not at all, and imply database specific limitations on the application. DB Abstraction layers, Object Relational Mapping, code gene

With any decent database you can write ANSI SQL for 99% of the work and never have to touch it again (unless you are going to use a POS like MySQL later).

There is a world of difference between the changes needed to go from SQL server to Oracle (as you say, stored procedures and other supersets of the ANSI spec) vs going to/from an incompetent implementation like MySQL.

I normally mod down both trolls *and* the people stupid enough- or with too little self-control- to be lured into replying to them.

However, given that at least three ****wits have already modded you "informative" for this post, I feel obliged to point out that the original comment is more than likely a Joe job [wikipedia.org] (as well as a troll), and pretty obvious one.

Matter of fact, I wouldn't discount the possibility that "your" comment was made by the same person as the original, but the fact it was modded up sh

He's been posting these emails in almost every thread for the last few days. He's the "my fast pc" spammer for some unknown Linux website. If you check his Contact page [linuxadvocates.com] you'll see I am not him as he doesn't like his email address displayed in a scrape-able way

Are you really that dim? I already linked "joe job" and you still managed to miss the entire point.

Let me explain it in *very* *simple* *words*. The person that posted the original "spam" above is probably *not* "Dieter T. Schmitz" as they claim, but someone else who is (a) trying to make him look bad (b) trolling, and/or (c) stirring up trouble by pretending to post spam under his identity.

Your logic is circular- you're already assuming that "he" posted the original comment, when in fact "he" probably

I've worked at many companies. Rarely are the founders the ones who make the product great. People like Linus are a rare exception, not the norm. Expecting him to recreate his previous impressions is unrealistic at best.